Local SEO bears very high potential in the era of targeted local market. More than 50% of visitors seeking to purchase a particular product prefer to find a local store or business.
SEO is the lifeline of any business as it creates awareness about your brand, builds reputation and generates organic traffic for your website. SEO for local businesses helps to convert as much as 60% searches into sales.
SEO is a primary tool for digital marketers, but they encounter potential problems in delivering quality results for local businesses.
Let us discuss these problems before trying to overcome them in our effort to maximize sales for local business owners.
Lack of Location-specific Content
High-quality content is the content that is relevant, original, and caters to the local audience. Most websites lack location-specific content, hence cannot compete with heavily funded sites. Targeted customers are unable to find any content that meets their requirements. Hence SEO on such websites does not yield any fruitful results.
Solution
- Location centric keywords- Webmasters should pay heed to keywords that are used by local customers, searching for a particular product or service on the internet.
- Original content- There should not be any duplication of content because Google algorithms dump websites that portray repeated content.
- Alt tags- Alt tags should also incorporate local keywords other than the main content.
- Title tags- Care should be taken to optimize the title tags. Include your business name in the title tags. Do not forget that the internal pages of a website are also very important to make a website visible to search engines.
- Meta tags- Meta tags should contain location-specific content.
Lack of Location-specific pages
Local pages or city pages deal with a specific area your serve. You can have a different version of these pages for every region, city, or country that you work for.
Location-specific pages are crucial for your business as they help target the kind of customers you want for your business. All your digital marketing efforts will go in vain without local pages, and you will lose on leads.
Solutions
- Optimize your page title to include not only your brand name but also the elements of a local area, along with your products and services.
- Instead of just focussing on the generic pages such as ‘Home,’ ‘About Us’, and ‘Services,’ add local-centric terms to your page title.
Inconsistent NAP Details
It is essential for the NAP details i.e., the Name, Address, and Phone Number of your business to be consistent across your pages. Local SEO utilizes this locally centered information to tap targeted customers, and NAP is the primary point of contact for customers to approach you for your product or service.
Solution
- Get your NAP details listed in major Search Directories.
- Check for any duplicate listings in the search directories.
- If your listings contain any inconsistent NAP details, get them rectified by your support representatives.
Multiple or Incorrect Listings on Google
Pages that have multiple or incorrect listings will be ranked low by search engines.
Accuracy and consistency are the two basic criteria used for ranking websites by search engines. Many times the home page entries in your listings may point to a different URL, which is a deterrent for Local SEO.
Solutions
- Make different listings point to one URL only
- Claim your website to be listed on Google My Business and other major directories.
- If your business is located in multiple cities or countries, include a separate landing page for each location.
Lack of Social Media Presence
Local Businesses that do not have a good presence in social media channels do not well work with online businesses. Social Media has crept into the lives of people so much so that they will not buy your product or service if you do not show up well on social media.
Solutions
- Follow Facebook Marketing Solutions to guide you through increasing your presence on Facebook.
- Utilize the guidelines set by ‘Twitter for small Business’ to mark your presence felt on Twitter.
Lack of Good citations
Local citations significantly impact local search engine rankings. A local citation is an online reference to the NAP of a business in local business directories, apps, or social media. These citations help online customers unearth new businesses.
Incorrect citations misdirect customers, which results in loss of reputation and revenue.
Solutions
- You should discover and build a relationship with the sources from where citations for your business can be generated.
- Placing authoritative content on your website and using relevant keywords is critical for other businesses to cite in their pages.
Absence of good reviews.
Lack of good reviews adversely affects local SEO. People purchase a product or service only when they have sufficient trust in the brand. The only source online customers can rely on for building faith in an online product is through other people’s reviews and feedback. People will trust a product if they can see positive reviews about the product.
Solution
- Follow guidelines set by Google My Business when you ask your customers to post reviews about your product.
- Posting false or fake reviews can sham your reputation. Refrain from doing so because once proven, you cannot earn back the trust of your customers.
- Include a page on your site for customers to post reviews. A system for managing reviews can be helpful.
Lack of good local SEO service providers
SEO requires a team of technically-skilled people to optimize your website. Local businesses have been suffering from the paucity of SEO service providers. Local business owners have been doing everything on their own, resulting in bad SEO results.
Solutions
- Avail the services of a reputed and knowledgeable digital marketing agency.
- To boost your local marketing results in its entirety, the SEO team should also be proficient in content, social media, and mobile marketing.
Local SEO services are a must for Small and Medium-scale Businesses because they target a local audience. Obstacles are many, requiring reasonable SEO efforts of an expert marketing company. The tips and guidelines presented in this article should prove valuable.
If your business needs any assistance on local SEO, Simple Intelligent Systems will be pleased to help you. You can mail us or give us a call and we will be happy to help.
